Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy – The Wasted Revision

My Pazuzu Trilogy is a millennially unique, blasphemous, scrubbed-til-Sunday epic. The Eighth Revision was the first pass in which I did not make major changes – I found typos and a few obtuse sentences, but other than those, the changes are smattering instances of migrating blocks of text into dialogue. The following four revisions were then experiments with character names and locations. So yeah, the current and last revision is the Twelfth. It’s called the Wasted Revision. This last rewrite is dedicated to my pseudonym, Mr. Binger, the author of the two-volume hardcover edition of the Eleventh revision re-entitled The Waste.

* Mr. Binger has also recently self-published his weird and visceral horror stories Unction and Our Lord Weathercock. Pocketbooks available at LULU.

I hope readers enjoy the free ebook version of Manifestation – the first installment of the trilogy. And I’d like them to tell everyone they know and buy the second and third book. Manifestation is mostly background. It’s where I introduce the consequences of a godless world. Emergence is when the narrative grows teeth and nails. Here is where Pazuzu is revealed and my alien gods find this feckless demon.

Pazuzu (pahzoo’zoo) – king of demons in Assyrian mythology.

Manifestation (manufe’steyshun) – indication of the presence of a person or thing.

PAZUZU – MANIFESTATION is the first book in the Pazuzu Trilogy. This book introduces the godless world of the Shur desert and the sorrowful sinners therein. Readers follow a pair of UnChosen wretches as they flee for their lives from a crime lord in the city of Gomorrah. A stranger joins the Cortras brothers, but he doesn’t tell them about the voice following him. The wanderer doesn’t know the voice is Pazuzu. In fact, the demon reminds him his name is Ben. This man suffering amnesia carries salvation and damnation from the desert.

Download a free ebook version of Pazuzu – Manifestation (The Wasted Revision), the first book in the Pazuzu Trilogy by Matthew Sawyer. Get it from Smashwords!

Emergence (i’merjuns) – gradual coming out as a result of something.

PAZUZU – EMERGENCE is the second book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. This book continues the bleak tale begun in Pazuzu – Manifestation.

Horror comes to the battered squatters at Saint Erasmus once the demon, Pazuzu, finds a host. Lost in the chaos, Hen Cortras is taken prisoner and followed into the Shur desert, where he meets heathens – nomadic terrorists who crusade against the Chosen’s Church and military.

Ebook Sample from Smashwords

Abeyance (u’beyuns) – suspension.

PAZUZU – ABEYANCE is the last book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. The last book follows the demon, Pazuzu, in the shadow of the Promised Land’s destruction.

Achieving its goal, Pazuzu has claimed a human body. The demon steals the frame of a boy and makes the mother a missionary. Before the old mother dies, she proclaims her demon-possessed son is the messiah – the reincarnation of the Chosen’s eviscerated Mortal God. Meanwhile, the younger Cortras brother is arrested and beaten by the Chosen’s military and sent to a detention camp outside Capital.

At the camp, Hen Cortras meets real-life heathens. The prisoners escape the Chosen’s military and Hen joins their march against the Chosen’s Promised Land. The heathen attack has already begun behind the monumental Wall and Khetam burns. Pazuzu and Benedict Gage, his heathen minister, now cross the fires of Capital in search of the flock gathered by the mother of the possessed boy. The alien gods are now aware of the demon moving through the world and they send monsters.

Ebook Sample from Smashwords

Matthew Sawyer’s Bio: A few words concerning myself.

About me … I don’t have any awards – not even an honorable mention. Heck, I didn’t even go to school to become a Writer – I was going to be a Fine Art Painter. Yet I had to pay my student loans. After college, I worked in Mental Health – as in schizophrenics and other assortment of severe mental disorders. All the while, I painted and sketched – and wrote stories. In that time, I speculated the story I really wanted to conjure – years of drawing monsters had spun my own mythology and I hoped for something comparable and real.

The narrative I wanted to create would fulfill a fading desire and breathe life into the chimeras I had drawn in my notebooks. That visual mythology had been collectively called “The Mortui Philosophies.” I tried animation, but the repetitive work only produced frustration. So much in fact, I joined the ‘sane’ world and switched careers into Internet Technology. Secure, I had stopped painting and focused on a very rewarding career. After a few years lacking expression from my creative self, my Pazuzu Trilogy took its first breath.

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Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.

I Did Build This

That short-sighted RNC slogan “We Built This” has certainly met plenty of rational argument. And the unyielding position of Tea Party-pandering Republicans isn’t false. It’s quite possible a single person has built his or her own business and all the infrastructure underneath. Although unlikely, it is possible and let me show you the results. I’m talking about my writing. I can safely say “I Built This.” I am that lone businessman and I suffer for the fact.

Despite my begging and pleas for assistance and support, I’ve been honest and forced to admit “No one’s helped me.” Nobody but readers have touched my writing. And even that number has dwindled. In all my work, there have been no editors, no proofreaders, no professional artists… and what I’ve generated is full of typos, grammar errors, false starts and tangential story lines. My return are poor scores (if any feedback at all) and an absent audience.

Sure, there are people I can pay who can help me reassemble my chimeric Frankenstein monsters – if I had that extra cash. But I don’t. I write because of love and necessity. I hoped I’d find someone who shares my principles (aka situation) but the climate in the United States has polarized everyone. We all want money and are stubborn when we insist opportunity exists. Unfortunately, that translates into a bleak life for everyone below the shrinking Middle Class. And if you’re not there yet, don’t expect a party when you face inevitable foreclosure and bankruptcy. The trodden poor have one honed thing – a memory of faces. Don’t think you’re hidden behind a boot heel. America is decidedly an un-Christian nation. It has always been – especially in the 1950′s and truly godless throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. We all say otherwise and print so much on money, have made our kids utter meaninglessness every school weekday and forced them to go to wholly reprehensible Sunday schools. BTW, this is where schools have failed. Stop making qualified teachers scapegoats.

But enough of my bleeding-heart, Liberal, socialist, Communist, Fascist threats. In truth, I am an intemperate moderate. On the Republican side, my heroes are Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob Lafayette and the ghost of Clint Eastwood. Sadly, Mr. Eastwood is no longer that man I idolize. I suppose it was inevitable. Did you see his speech at the 2012 RNC convention? Now there’s an old man I insist needs regular testing if he’s to carry a valid Driver’s License.

If you’ve just met me, ‘moderate’ and even ‘intemperate’ are not words I expect you’d associate with my hostile personality. And if you’ve known me for any stretched period of time, don’t blame the head injury that nearly killed me on Mother’s Day in 2007. I admit I’m a knee-jerk Reactionary. I’ve always been. It’s likely a mental illness I’m conscious about and seek no help. When I look around, I see my same symptoms in every other person. What I don’t do is own a gun. During my stunted trial in Army Reserves, I did my mental math and foresaw the danger of giving myself a firearm. And like my father, I prevent myself from harming others. (So don’t get any ideas. In the interest of being fair, I’ve warned people and some days I look for excuses.)

Half of America is populated by “balanced men.” That’s how see us and I have the sense to remain polite. So little pushes us either direction. Me again for instance – and this is why writers are accused of always speaking about themselves – I’m pulled to the far left because the uncooperative orneriness of the Tea Party. President Obama has been pulled, too. But let’s be honest. He is a responsible man. He’s remained presidential and in the middle of the road. Examine everything he’s done these past four years. Healthcare is only a Democrat issue because it’s a convenient distinction between political parties. To be fair, President Obama is closer to the dead and buried President Reagan than both subsequent Bushes.

We need centrality in the Presidency of the United States – especially because what it means for the Republicans to win is that someone must lose. They speak of sacrifice and wave flags, but they not talking about themselves. They specifically mean whole classes of people (women, minorities, the poor) must have their throats cuts. And it’s not God they want to appease. They want to satisfy pagan and gladiatorial blood lust. For instance, Karl Rove already kids about killing his own – and Jeebus, VP Cheney shoots his buddies in the face! But those facts are glossed and nearly forgotten. But that sadism is still there – you see Republicans gesture toward their throats and bellies in their speeches. That concealed guns are popular in this unregulating nation is evidence alone. No, it’s not sacrifice the GOP talks about. That is apparently a codeword for “Hunting Season is Open.” And the most dangerous prey is man – a fictional, leftward, liberal man. Christ, that’s me! How am I to react?

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Transformed and In Motion

How can I say it… metamorphicized. All those times I said I had converted my writing to the Active Voice, those were small white lies. I’ve since embraced the tense. I live in the moment and catch readers in my wake. They come towed into currents of strange action. Conversion-wise, my short stories fare best. I have four unpublished novels each evolved from the short stories and the evil I claim manifests in my Southern Wisconsin Wister Town. They are told here and now. Three of which are freshly submitted to publishers.

My Pazuzu Trilogy and Gaunt Rainbow are also revised – yet again. I must repeat, the trilogy is the cornerstone of my mythology. It’s a culmination and a passion. The work breathes life into the monsters I drew in sketchbooks collectively named the Mortui Philosophies. It’s only fitting my epic horror story is apocalyptic.

Turning from the sketchbook gospels, I’m showcasing my evolution as a writer with My Wister Town stories read them online free – here.

I  also have a couple free desktop wallpaper images at Deviantart. Come visit my Sawyerarts gallery. If you’re still reading me, thanks for hanging in there. I’m getting better, right? You folks gotta tell me or I’ll just listen to the trumpets of my own pandemonium.

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Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.

The Eighth Evil

The Eighth Revision of my Pazuzu Trilogy merits new synopses for each book. The Overviews on the websites also deserved attention, so I scrubbed those too. Remember, the story hasn’t changed, its now better for its rough massage. Ironic that the tale is so bleak …

My Pazuzu Trilogy presumes there is no good, no happy endings – there is no God. Here is the world of the Shur desert. An ocean borders the waste on its northwest side, but there is nothing else. Nomadic heathens have lived in the Shur for generations, waging cold war jihads against their enemies the Chosen.

The Chosen live with the meek UnChosen on oases plagued by heathen terrorism. Chosen and UnChosen share the same religion and petition the Mortal God whom the Chosen tribes had crucified and eviscerated before the heathen jihads began. The death of the Mortal God sparked the conflict based on clan and caste. See, there was One God – the Chosen’s Mortal God and Living God of the heathen are the same entity. Frustrated with unrepentant sinners, that God has abandoned His world.

In His place, alien gods have arrived. Nodding to the forlorn HP Lovecraft, these un-living aliens claim providence. A demon wakes who denies the will of this chaotic pantheon. That demon is Pazuzu and the fiend hides from this world’s new overlords. Pazuzu seeks a mortal body it might possess and walk the Shur in disguise.

The demon finds Benedict Ishkott, a man readers meet face-to-face as he crosses the Shur bareback and without his memory. Benedict is an impractical vessel, so the man and demon come to Capital - as in money and not a typo. Capital is a Chosen monument city surrounded by a polished limestone wall. Drugs, propaganda, exploitation and prejudice have weakened this wall and all sorts of malcontents sneak inside. The disaffected, illegal migrants at Saint Erasmus become the focus of the trilogy.

Pazuzu (pahzoo’zoo) – king of demons in Assyrian mythology.
Manifestation (manufe’steyshun) – indication of the presence of a person or thing.

PAZUZU – MANIFESTATION is the first book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. This book introduces the godless world of the Shur desert and the sorrowful sinners therein. Readers follow a pair of UnChosen wretches as they flee for their lives from a crime lord in the city of Gomorrah.

The Cortras brothers believe they’ll find safety in the walled city called Capital. While the pair cross the desert, they encounter a man wandering the waste alone. The brothers think he is a heathen terrorist and hope they will collect the reward for the man’s arrest.

The stranger joins the Cortras brothers, but he doesn’t tell them about the voice following him. He doesn’t know the voice is Pazuzu. In fact, the demon reminds him his name is Ben. One man suffering amnesia carries salvation and damnation from the desert.

Pazuzu (pahzoo’zoo) – king of demons in Assyrian mythology.
Emergence (i’merjuns) – gradual coming out as a result of something.

PAZUZU – EMERGENCE is the second book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. This book continues the bleak tale begun in Pazuzu – Manifestation.

Horror comes to the battered squatters at Saint Erasmus once the demon, Pazuzu, finds a host. Lost in the chaos, Hen Cortras is taken prisoner and followed into the Shur desert, where he meets heathens – nomadic terrorists who crusade against the Chosen’s Church and military.

Pazuzu (pahzoo’zoo) – king of demons in Assyrian mythology.
Abeyance (u’beyuns) – suspension.

PAZUZU – ABEYANCE is the last book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. The last book follows the demon, Pazuzu, in the shadow of the Promised Land’s destruction.

Achieving its goal, Pazuzu has claimed a human body. The demon steals the frame of a boy and makes the mother a missionary. Before Tamara Stoughnt dies, she proclaims her demon-possessed son is the messiah – the reincarnation of the Chosen’s eviscerated Mortal God. Meanwhile, the younger Cortras brother is arrested and beaten by the Chosen’s military and sent to a detention camp outside Capital.

At the camp, Hen Cortras meets real-life heathens. The prisoners escape the Chosen’s military and Hen joins their march against the Chosen’s Promised Land. The heathen attack has already begun behind the monumental Wall and Capital burns. Pazuzu and Benedict Ishkott, his heathen minister, now cross the fires of Capital in search of the flock gathered by the mother of the possessed boy. The alien gods are now aware of the demon moving through the world and they send monsters.

Books in the Pazuzu Trilogy -

PAZUZU – MANIFESTATION, the first book in the trilogy.

PAZUZU – EMERGENCE, the second book.

PAZUZU – ABEYANCE is the last book of the trilogy.

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Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.

The Disposable Preface

My Pazuzu Trilogy originally didn’t have a Preface, and I had immediately launched my epic with the imposter-priest Benedict Ishkott wandering the Shur desert alone. The first complaint I heard was the story was complicated – so I added a Preface. This Preface entails the fallout following death of the original priest at Saint Erasmus. Besides other duties, Captain Kanen oversees the parish and must appoint a minister. Captain Kanen is blackmailed and invites his extortionist into the walled city of Capital – yeah, the Chosen call their monument city ‘money.’

The recurring theme in the trilogy is disappointed schemes and exceptions, so Capital illustrates that hypocritical propaganda because the horrible transportation network for the city’s civilians, strict censorship, lack of airports and advanced weaponry, as well as the Middle and Lower castes subjected to a militaristic theocracy. This is the city to which Pazuzu comes and looks for someone the demon can possess because Ben doesn’t “work-out.”

Essentially, what I did with the Preface is remove from Manifestation – the castes, the Chosen’s Church, the drug epidemic, the original Benedict Ishkott – - and included that information at the very beginning. The Preface is primer. As such, readers don’t need to read it and they can skip straight to chapter one, The Wilderness. The Preface is a guide or travel brochure for the godless world of the Shur.

Godless – big deal, like other authors haven’t exploited the idea and if proof isn’t apparent to the unfaithful in the “real world.” Don’t be so judgmental and jump to conclusions – a Godless world is at once a gimmick and crucial for the existence of the Shur desert and all the sinners who dwell within. Because God has abandoned the Shur, alien gods have taken over a pre-Judeo-Christian demon has awoke. Pazuzu hides from the alien gods because they think the demon knows the secret to life in this wasteland. I’m telling readers outright because that’s all back story. The Pazuzu Trilogy concentrates on the unwitting victims in this ethereal game of cat-and-mouse. Those victims represent humankind and how the cosmic war derails their mortal endeavors. Once Abeyance begins, Capital burns and the conflict between Pazuzu and alien gods takes precedence.

Manifestation is the first in the Pazuzu Trilogy. Critics have claimed “nothing happens,” but I disagree. More specifically, all the characters have been introduced and are posed for their roles in the following two books. Events transpire in Manifestation that put these characters into position. Ben, Davey, Margot, the Cortras brothers and their assassin are all fattened for the impending slaughter.

I said readers can skip the Preface, but I’ve got the latest below in case people are anxious for the story or prefer later diving into Chapter 1.

Enjoy!

Matthew Sawyer

Preface

Outrage, because Captain Kanen had become the victim of extortion, or the lack of amphetamine made the priest’s fat hands quiver. Kanen tugged his collarless white shirt and finally removed his uniform’s heavy black jacket. The UnChosen caste called the drug “Ape;” the street name for the stuff that typically turned users into anxious, howling gorillas. Such a consequence could never happen to a priest, the upper echelon of the Chosen caste. All the pomp and dignity granted to Kanen’s position guarded against that base lunacy. The unquiet phases of the chemically grown monkey would not drive Josiah Kanen into madness. The Church had promoted this middle-aged priest to the rank of captain because his genetically endowed discipline gave him immaculate willpower. Captain Josiah Kanen was, after all, born a Chosen. Birthright granted him authority over the Mortal God.

Even so, the responsibility of rank crushed Kanen under stones. The duties the Church pressed on Captain Kanen had driven him to use the damned drug in the first place. The problem with Ape wasn’t the use of the drug, but the lack of using any once addicted. Sobriety-sharpened nails now pressed into his chest and head. From the perspective of his tormented rut, being clean took away the magic of knowing exactly what to do in any situation, and making sense of other people. Nobody listened to Kanen when he went without Ape, they just babbled and interrupted when he spoke. Sobriety compromised his ability to control his god and the forsaken UnChosen that dwelt within his squalid quarter by the Wall.

Reverend Arnett, whom Kanen had assigned the custodianship of the Saint Erasmus parish, had recently been murdered in its church. The crime was unheard within the walled city of Capital, the Promised Land of the Chosen. The Wall protected the city from the ravages of heathen terrorists. No one passed through the Wall without the approval of the Church or its military. The Chosen exercised exclusive entrance into Capital.

The UnChosen permitted behind the Wall lived in forsaken parishes like Saint Erasmus – a suitable batch of hovels for those spineless degenerates. Still, the status of the murdered victim raised the severity of the crime to an act of terrorism. The Church and its military’s censors debated if news of the crime should be made public, but had never made a decision.

One thing Kanen was certain – the presence of pagan tablets on the altar inside Saint Erasmus would never be reported to the public. The Church had immediately confiscated and destroyed the sacrilegious objects. Whatever the dead Reverend Arnett once planned with them was better left unknown. The blasphemous controversy went with him into death. Reverend Arnett had brought the awful fate upon himself.

The phone rang in the midst of Kanen’s cope with his lack of Ape, that and the murder of a priest that had been too curious with an archaic and forbidden religion. Reverend Benedict Ishkott called, again. The Aper was a non-commissioned bastard from the city of Gomorrah. Captain Kanen had just hung-up on the irreverent extortionist.

“Why do you keep calling here?” Kanen shouted into the phone inside his dark and private, casual office at the Church. “Stop calling me.”

“Captain – Kanen,” Reverend Ishkott stuttered with the aggravated squall of an addict. “I know you don’t know me from Adam, but you have something I want.”

“A demotion?” threatened Kanen. “Why, in the name of the Mortal God, do you dare speak to me with such lack of respect?”

The two priests shared an addiction to Ape, with a difference. Ape caused Reverend Ishkott to lose respect for superior officers, sending him out-of-the-way to Gomorrah. The drug gave Ishkott arrogant hopes and ambitions – whereas Kanen had already gladly reached his own pinnacle.

“Listen, I know you’re related to Judah Batheirre, the crime-lord in this city,” Ishkott said, uncovering his hand.

Hopefully, Ishkott didn’t know how complicated the relationship between Captain Kanen and Judah Batheirre had become. The crime-lord used the captain for his connection with the Church, although Judah’s patience had grown thin with Josiah, resulting in Ape becoming difficult to find in Capital and impossible to obtain. Many of Kanen’s brethren in the Church had stopped coming to the offices at headquarters. Those nervous wretches who showed up this morning were useless and hid behind closed doors, like Kanen.

“That is a sad coincidence,” Kanen claimed.

“I know you keep the military away from Gomorrah,” Ishkott stated. “And I know Batheirre is your Ape connection.”

“I know you are a dead man, Ishkott,” Kanen shouted over the phone. “How dare you call me with your crazy accusations.”

“Listen,” Ishkott shouted back. “Military patrols will come to this city, whether you like it or not. Ilu Drystani is in this part of the Shur. Colonel Tacklate himself is coming here.”

Colonel Tacklate’s trip to Gomorrah presented a bigger problem, one Kanen should have anticipated – he knew the colonel swept through the region annually. Captain Kanen reported to the colonel, as would Ishkott when the bishop arrived at Gomorrah. Ishkott, the tattling Aper, may tell their superior officer anything.

“What do you want?” Kanen capitulated.

“An assignment away from Gomorrah and heathens,” Ishkott bartered. “This city will fall to terrorists next, Drystani IS here.”

“Let me think,” Kanen replied. The solution came to him with a staggered breath.

The situation seemed to work itself out – a custodian position had recently opened at Saint Erasmus and a priest materialized who would shut his mouth if invited into Capital. Josiah did not think ahead when he offered the position to Ishkott, because the wretched blackmailer might one day twist Josiah’s arm again. Yet the treacherous possibility failed occurring to him and did not stop Josiah from asking if Reverend Ishkott would bring Ape into Capital.

“No, of course not,” Ishkott denied with a strained snort.

“Please, there’s none here. You won’t find Ape behind the Wall.”

Ishkott thought Captain Kanen could not be trusted with the truth. His supervisor’s plea sounded like a trap. “No,” squeaked Ishkott.

“That’s unfortunate,” answered Kanen before hanging up. Josiah had looked forward toward another batch of Ape for himself.

- END -

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Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.